Early December: As I suspected, the BBC Short Story competition is won by my least favourite of the shortlisted five – the one about the terminally-ill son. It was beautifully written: I just think that if you’re going to write about terminal illness without adding anything new, the work needs to be as good as Alan Bennett’s ‘A Woman Of No Importance’, or Douglas Dunn’s ‘Elegies’ or Lee Hall’s ‘Spoonface Steinberg’ or James L Brooks’s ‘Terms Of Endearment’. Still, the runner-up was Sarah Maitland, which was my own second choice after Ms Alderman.

I take no pleasure in finding myself out of sync like this. I don’t care for ‘contrarian’ writers who go against the consensus for attention seeking reasons. ‘Look at me! I hate the thing everyone likes, and like the thing everyone hates.’ But neither do I enjoy finding myself in agreement with the fashions of the day – I’d feel I was doing something wrong somewhere.

Part of me likes the fact that I dislike The X Factor, for instance, because if I liked it, I would have to rebuild my character from scratch. So I’m grateful to Most People for ensuring that the one thing Most People like is utterly awful and vulgar and tasteless and crass and banal and artless and… just baffling. But I feel this instinctively, never deliberately. One person’s snobbery is another’s self-validation.

So when people on the internet organise that Rage Against The Machine single-buying campaign to thwart the X Factor winner, I find myself wanting both sides to lose, on top of just feeling very alone full stop. Rather as I am with football. I like the look of the X Factor winner – a very well-turned out young man called Joe, against the inelegant, tiresome RATM. But I have to admit the song Mr Joe was given was an unmemorable, dull, watery ballad. Whereas hearing that RATM song – with swearing intact – upsetting Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 the other morning was a rather fun radio moment. Anything for a more interesting world.

What I’d really like is to write songs for Joe myself. Or indeed, write for Will Young.  Stranger things have happened. Then again, Will Young was on that short story judging panel…

***

Am staying in Crouch End over Christmas and New Year. Cat-sitting and flat-sitting , this time for Jennifer C and Chris H. Cat in question is Vyvian, who came over from San Francisco with Jennifer some years ago. He has one of those cat passports. J can’t easily lay her hands on it, so my illusions are intact; in my head it has a little cat photo  – with unflattering cat haircut – and a series of pawprints.

Of the five North London cats I know, two of them are named after characters in 80s BBC TV comedies. Vyvian is named after one of The Young Ones, while Anna S’s cat Flashheart is from Blackadder.

***

Today, entirely randomly and because the train from the nearest station to the flat – Hornsey overground – terminates at Moorgate, I wander around the Barbican estate. I marvel at the juxtaposition of old and new architecture at every angle, particularly the ancient St Giles Church surrounded at every side by very 1980s terraces. It looks like it’s been teleported there by some cackling sci-fi villain.

In the Barbican centre someone recognises me and says hello – Francesca Beard. She’s performing a children’s show there. There’s a horrible second where I can’t remember her name – (‘How dare you, brain’, goes the internal voice), followed by a slightly uneasy few minutes as I struggle to think of what best to say on such occasions. In about 2000 I was a fan of her performance poetry (the Fosca song ‘Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ takes its title from one of her poems) and I saw her gigs fairly often. And then – what? She didn’t stop performing. I stopped going to (and trying my hand at) performance poetry gigs, in my dipping-but-never-committing way. But I did see her at Latitude this year, so her place in my mind’s filing system isn’t as dusty as it could have been.

It’s times like this where my near-autistic inability to connect names and faces in person, coupled with my lack of basic social skills (which words to choose, and in which order? there are so many!), leaves me riven with guilt for the rest of the day.

It’s like the film ‘Memento’. I just wish I could remember fewer cult fictional films about amnesia and more things that actually matter.

About an hour later – today still, Dec 23rd -  I’m in the London Review Bookshop, and again someone behind me says, ‘Hello, Dickon.’ And as I turn to face the person – I’m such a bad actor, and so much of life is acting – I can’t help pulling the very honest but very offensive expression of panic through lack of recognition. It’s David Kitchen, who once worked for Orlando 1995-1997, setting up the band’s information service and website – this diary’s precursor – and whose flat in Kew I regularly visited and once stayed the night at. True, I’ve had no contact with him for the best part of ten years, but that’s no excuse.

(And it’s only now that I realise that the flat I’m staying in is owned by one of David K’s London circle of friends from that time, Chris H. He edited the first Belle & Sebastian videos, while David worked for B&S in websitey ways. I wish I could have mentioned this connection to David today, rather than grasping for things to say and apologising for not remembering his name.)

What confuses me is that in my mind I know exactly who David K is and what he looks like. It’s when I’m presented with him in the flesh, unexpected, out of the blue, and after a ten year gap, that my mind can’t cope. If I was told that I’d be meeting David K in the LRB today, I’d have no problem recognising him at once. And yet, I still feel that it’s my fault, that I’m a terrible, selfish, self-centred person, and the encounter upsets me for the rest of the day. I only hope he doesn’t mind as much as I do.

Even when I can connect names and faces, a surprise chat with friends from the past can never be easy. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Something not involving you.’

One fear of mine is that when I die, there’ll be a test.

I envy Doctor Who. At least he gets played by a different actor every time a chapter of his life passes. I have enough of a struggle learning the script for my current role, never mind roles gone by.

And again the thought is, is it just me?  Is this a medical condition, a syndrome, a kind of dyslexia? A younger man’s Alzheimer’s? It certainly feels like it.

Tags: aging anxiety, david kitchen, francesca beard, London, my mind